Video Description:
Sustainability Advisory Board Meeting – February 16, 2022
Note: The following is the output of transcribing from a video recording. Although the transcription, which was done with software, is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or [software] transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the meeting, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
Read along below or follow along here: https://otter.ai/u/4V5IDVzq46fnsCs0PaHTKUG5GcI
Unknown Speaker 0:03
There we go. From the top. Yeah. All right. I would now like to call the February 16 2022 Longmont sustainability Advisory Board Meeting to order. Can we please start with
Unknown Speaker 0:17
roll call? Kate colleagues in President Adam reed here. Jim Metcalf,
Unknown Speaker 0:24
present.
Unknown Speaker 0:26
Charles Musgrave
Unknown Speaker 0:28
present. Here we go. Kay Valmeyer, President, and Robert Davidson. Staff members, we have Lisa Knobloch just joined. So we’ll get her on Francy Jaffe. Here, Susan Bartlett. Here. Heather McIntyre is here and Councilmember Martin here. And then we also have Joe Kelly with us from the community.
Unknown Speaker 1:01
Great. And we have a quorum.
Unknown Speaker 1:04
You have a quorum? Yes. Fantastic.
Unknown Speaker 1:07
I will now be read the land acknowledgement statement. We acknowledge that Longmont sits on the traditional territory of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, ute and other indigenous peoples. We honor the history and the living and spiritual connection that the first peoples have with this land. It is our commitment to face the injustices that happen when the land was taken, and to educate our communities, ourselves and our children to ensure that these injustices do not happen again. At an all company meeting today, after our land acknowledgement statement, there’s another statement that I want to read. It is important to note that this kind of land acknowledgement statement is not a new practice developed by colonial institutions. And acknowledgement is a traditional custom dating back centuries for many Native communities and nations. I just thought I’d add that today. Thank you. Um, so annual review of duties and responsibilities. Other and Lisa, thank you will be leading us through this.
Unknown Speaker 2:23
Lisa did make you go so you should be able to come on.
Unknown Speaker 2:28
Yeah. Hi, everyone. Heather, I think that, that this is something that you have normally led in the past. And we’re going to do it in January and got it and push it to February of the general business items. Okay, of posting places. And
Unknown Speaker 2:48
so let me see here. Did everybody get a chance to read the rules and regulations that were included in the packet? Did anybody have any changes or changes or anything that they would like to make to them? I’m not seeing any. We also had a discussion later in the year. I think it was like October, November, about the start time for this meeting being the third Wednesday and the 330 to 530. I didn’t know if that was something that you all wanted to revisit today, or do at a later time.
Unknown Speaker 3:29
Oh, I forgotten about that. We haven’t talked about that, haven’t we? If we change this to a later time, that meant K that you could not participate? Right.
Unknown Speaker 3:41
Probably not going to be able to participate at least 50% of the year. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 3:47
Okay. And does this time work for everyone? I think Charles, did you have a conflict with this time? Or is it okay, as long as we’re not in person?
Unknown Speaker 4:00
Yes, making it in person would make it hard for me to attend at this time. But if it’s my zoom, it’s fine. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 4:10
What’s the status? I mean? Obviously, we’re still in a pandemic. But whoa, what are what are your thoughts around? Moving to imperson? From a is are we doing this on Zoom because of our particular board right now or is the city are all city boards on Zoom?
Unknown Speaker 4:33
I think back in January, they made the decision to go back to zoom but they I know. I’m pretty sure and Councilmember Martin you can weigh in. I think that city council discussed this at the meeting last night. So I don’t know if you have an update on that.
Unknown Speaker 4:50
Yes, I do. The city council has acknowledged that we are almost back down to the case rate We’re in person meetings would make sense again, the Boulder County Department of Health has lifted the mask restrictions as of 5pm, this coming Friday. And the council has voted for to to, to stay virtual for a couple of weeks longer to make to try to see that we get actually down to the red level or below the old red level. But you know, we’ve been so far above that for so long that nobody even talks about it anymore. But But that’s really sort of our, our safe level. If we plateau. Above that, I’m thinking we’ll probably go back to in person for March, or maybe for April, when we vote on whether we’re going to keep it to three meetings a month or four. But for now, we have we’ve stayed virtual for another two weeks.
Unknown Speaker 6:06
And I think part of that it’s really up to each board according to the city attorney’s office. So if you all wanted to stay virtual, we could we would just need to add that to our rules and regulations to make that an option for the board to decide.
Unknown Speaker 6:26
A quick thumbs up thumbs down. The folks like the board members want to keep doing virtual for the next couple of months. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Alright. Okay. So I find it convenient. I find it very convenient as well. It’s lovely. Hey, can we stay this course then for the next couple of months at least? And then reassess.
Unknown Speaker 7:06
Okay, you want to do it through April and then decide at the May or decide at the April meeting how you want to continue for the other months? Or?
Unknown Speaker 7:14
Yes, please. Okay. Just keep kicking that can.
Unknown Speaker 7:21
And probably, let’s go ahead and do a vote on that just so that we can get added to the bylaws that you guys can make that decision to do virtual meetings. So that because we really are beyond the emergency orders that we had from the city level, to be able to enable us to do that. So let’s go ahead and do a vote to put it into the rules and regulations. And then so I just need a motion a second and then your
Unknown Speaker 7:48
vote. But I’ll move that this board meetings remained virtual, at least through through April. Thank you, Chairman.
Unknown Speaker 8:01
I will second the motion.
Unknown Speaker 8:02
Thank you. Okay. All in favor?
Unknown Speaker 8:06
Aye. That’s a six zero,
Unknown Speaker 8:08
then the next thing that we have on the agenda is because it’s the beginning of the year, we need to reelect officers. So we would entertain nominations for chair don’t jump in there at once. Well,
Unknown Speaker 8:28
I’d like to nominate Kate again because I think she’s been doing a fantastic job. And I see no reason. Yes.
Unknown Speaker 8:35
Take the words out of my mouth.
Unknown Speaker 8:38
Thank you want to second that then. Okay. Are there any other nominations? I can
Unknown Speaker 8:43
a nomination for Kate, as long as she’ll accept it.
Unknown Speaker 8:49
Thanks. Any other nominations? All right, let’s call a vote then for making collards in the chair for 2022.
Unknown Speaker 9:01
Those in favor?
Unknown Speaker 9:04
Are you just abstaining? Because it’s you
Unknown Speaker 9:10
know, you’re starting to get nervous that you don’t want this.
Unknown Speaker 9:15
Let’s do for Vice Chair art. Do we have a nomination for Vice Chair?
Unknown Speaker 9:22
I just as the current Vice Chair, I would have no problem at all was somebody else we’d like to have the experience of doing it. So I will not take it as a slap in my face. Somebody would like to nominate themselves as vice chair.
Unknown Speaker 9:34
Powell was you had your hand raised.
Unknown Speaker 9:36
Just gonna nominate Jim.
Unknown Speaker 9:39
So that was I that’s like, I’ll get the nomination for Jim.
Unknown Speaker 9:49
Bright, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. All right. Hate your. And then the last thing is the designated posting place. So according to the Colorado Sunshine Law, we have to designate a place for public notices of the meetings. Last year, we decided to do the city’s website as a primary one and the bulletin board at the service center as our physical location and secondary location. So any Do we have any discussion on moving that or keeping it the same?
Unknown Speaker 10:35
I don’t see any reason to change it.
Unknown Speaker 10:41
I would agree. Do you need us to move for that?
Unknown Speaker 10:45
I think we can just say that we will just keep it the same as we did last year. That the vote so any objections to that? Okay, I think we’re good. And I’ll turn it back over to Kate. All right.
Unknown Speaker 11:03
Okay, so the next item Oh, Lord, I’ve lost the gentleman. Okay, found it. The next item is the approval of the minutes. Would anybody like to make a motion to approve the minutes from last meeting?
Unknown Speaker 11:24
All motion to approve. I’ll second. All in favor.
Unknown Speaker 11:30
All right. The motion passes. Thank you. It I would now like to open it up for public invited to be heard. We have one member of the public who would like to be heard you will have you will be unmuted and you will have three minutes for your comment. Please. State your name and your address for the record. And I I will time you. So
Unknown Speaker 12:04
great. We have dough Kelly up. Perfect. Can you hear me? We can Yes.
Unknown Speaker 12:10
Okay, this is Joe Kelly of barberry drive in Longmont. Okay, good afternoon, you guys. This is a quote entitled strange symptoms by Richard H. Conrad PhD, a John Hopkins trained biochemist from his testimony to the main PUC regarding smart meter opt out programs. The quote is derivative of information collated from the main smart meter survey that he conducted. The date is February 2013. So the issue is not new. I quote many of them said they had never heard of electrical sensitivities before. We’re developing strange symptoms they never had before, could not use computers Wi Fi or cell phones anymore without painful symptoms. Even though previously they had been using them heavily with Wi Fi in offices and on in homes. 24/7 weeks or months after their symptoms began they first discovered a smart meter on their home. Upon inquiry they found out it had been installed at the time or just before their symptoms initiated. All this was surprising to me because this device, Harry’s referring to a smart meter was initiating EAS or electro sensitivity in previously normal healthy persons who had tolerated Wi Fi and cell phones for years with no problems. And quote, in April of 2016, I became electro sensitive after having the next slide install at mid day, a new wireless router in our living room. By that evening, my burning face, hands, ears and head were only continued confirmation of what I thought I knew that I had been tipped into electro sensitivity and had received what’s now being called a microwave injury. This injury was confirmed to me by a brain mapping therapist I was seeing at the time as my before and after brain graphs were startlingly different. I’m sure you all know that wireless devices and the infrastructure that supports them are sending and receiving them information by a microwave carrier waves. For most people, this is not a problem. For the canaries in the coal mine and increasing numbers of others worldwide. It is a massive and growing public health phenomenon. And yet this problem remains mostly invisible like the microwaves that are causing it. I am grateful to city council for standing up for the rights of people like me by offering an opt out. On the other hand, it seems unjust, that someone who’s already electrosensitive in order to not be exposed to this radiation be forced to pay a monthly fee. There must be a better way and I charged you with a task of finding it for myself, I would like to propose to the city a no fee opt out, I will send you via Heather an email with a couple of links to articles regarding this subject, and with the above quote and link to the main survey. Thank you for listening. And I hope you will consider this proposal seriously.
Unknown Speaker 15:25
Thank you for sharing. Any any comments from the board? I look forward to receiving that. That information, though. Thanks for sharing. Okay. Are there any agenda revisions or documents to be submitted? Yes.
Unknown Speaker 15:51
Can I just add on the items from staff? There’s a an item about bringing sab applicant applications to the board for review. I just want to update you on that. Okay. Perfect. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 16:13
Okay. Alright, so the next item on the agenda is the electrical electrification plan. progress update. Susan, you have a floor. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 16:38
Board members. Thanks for having me back. I think it was November, when I talked with you all. Before about this. Not a second, let me get my screens arranged correctly. There we go. Yep. So I appreciate your willingness to hear from me again. And I think since that time, you have a new city council representative. And Marsha could probably give this talk just as easily as I could at this point, because she’s been very much involved in in our work to try to get to 100% here on my view, sorry. Sorry, I’m fussing with my screens a little bit. Okay, I’m just gonna go with it there. When when I was last talking with you, you mentioned that you would be interested in hearing some of the results of the research that was underway and the modeling that we were doing. And we have a little bit of that coming in at this point. And so I wanted to just share with you what we know their next slide, Heather.
Unknown Speaker 18:08
Oh, next one.
Unknown Speaker 18:12
And since there’s no one knew on the board, I won’t go real deep into our process. This is kind of the same that I showed you last time, but but our arrow is a little further down the path. So our advisory committee has been meeting since summer time and has helped with a variety of topics and activities, looking at best practices. And we talked about workforce development issues not too long ago. And they’ve kind of reviewed some of the study results that have come in. We’ll continue to meet into the spring as we start to build out the plans. So we’re glad to have them all on board. We’re also continuing to work on a communications plan. That’s kind of part and parcel of the electrification plan so that we have good ways to talk about the things that we are encouraging people to do. And the culmination of the work is going to be this phased building electrification plan with recommended policies, programs, strategies, like education campaigns, equipment, incentives, code updates, workforce training, that kind of thing. We’re aiming to have a final plan by August of 2022. Next slide. So again, because of your interest in some of the results that we’re seeing, I wanted to share what we’ve learned today. And part of that was work that we started in early 2021. It was a collaboration with Fort Collins utilities. Were we brought on Apex analytics. First to do a national inventory of other electrification incentive programs offered through through other electric utilities in the United States. And then to do a little bit of local market research on just level of awareness, both for our contractor pool and our customer base. We wanted to hear from them on, you know, what they know about heat pump technologies or other electrification measures, and then what they see as market challenges in our area. And then the third part of APEX work with us in with Fort Collins was to develop a just a jurisdiction specific cost effectiveness analysis that was looking at residential electrification measures. And this work is going to help us prioritize what makes the most sense for our community in terms of recommendations and program development. As an aside, apex is also working with Platte River Power Authority on a grid forecast analysis. So what they’re doing is looking at the potential for electrification adoption across all four of the owner communities, and what those impacts will have on generation, but also and to a limited degree on our distribution systems, which is really important as we try and figure out what this looks like in 10 years or 20 years. Next slide. I wanted to share some highlights with you from the local market research. It gave us a good sense for what folks are thinking about or not thinking about in our communities. And one of the things that I wanted to point out that with our contractor focus group, we had seven or eight, I don’t remember what our final number was of contractors that participated. And they all demonstrated really high awareness of heat pump technologies in in homes and small businesses. And we don’t think that’s generally the case, I think what you might agree with is that the folks that agree to participate are usually those that are the most engaged, and the most knowledgeable. And so we think that’s probably what happened here. But nonetheless, we were glad to hear from them. And they had some good things to share with us. I thought, interestingly, they view, he pumped technologies and electrification technologies as an opportunity. They see this as coming and they want to be on board with it, they want to be able to be experts, they see the projects having higher value for them as a business. They also understand the efficiency of a lot of this equipment. But they were also very quick to point out some of the challenges that they’re already facing.
Unknown Speaker 22:59
One of those, of course, as you might imagine, is just higher cost consumers for this equipment. And they’re primarily working, the ones that we talked to are primarily working in the existing building market as opposed to new construction. But they’re also concerned about the fact that a lot of this equipment is much more complex than some of the standard HVAC and water heating equipment that they’ve installed in the past. And what that means is more training is required for their technicians. And there’s, it’s more challenging to troubleshoot when things go wrong. Also, they pointed out just how much variability there can be from home to home. And this could come in the form of ductwork if it’s a central system, or panel capacity, or insulation and air sealing just a lot of variables that make it harder to work in this sector. And then one thing they also pointed out is that he pump technologies require a good deal of customer retraining, if you will, so that they understand how how to use the equipment in a way that’s that’s optimized and that it does behave differently than your natural gas furnace. If you’re trying to heat a space. You know, we’ve we’ve taught everybody to use programmable thermostats with setbacks when we’re gone and at night when we’re sleeping and you know, heat pump technology doesn’t necessarily respond well in those circumstances with those kinds of controls. So they just wanted us to be aware that they’re seeing that in the market. One thing they also did it we I don’t know that if it was universal across all contractors, but they talked about how they are almost always recommending a heat pump anytime there’s an air conditioner replaced sent that they’re they’re looking at. So we thought that was really good feedback. And then Apex also did a customer survey across Fort Collins and Longmont customers. And proud to say that we had more participants than Fort Collins did so yay from online. It looked at three different sets of customers. One was customers who had participated in our efficiency Works program or Boulder County Energy Smart program, one group that had replaced equipment but hadn’t participated in those programs. And then a third group that hadn’t done any equipment upgrades. So we had a pretty broad variety of folks that responded. And, you know, what we learned is that most people are not going to replace equipment until it fails. And when it does fail, they’re going to put in exactly what came out. That’s it’s easy, it’s what a lot of contractors recommend. It’s familiar, they know how to run it, that tends to be the option they go with. of the folks that responded at 2%. Either we’re not very, or we’re not at all familiar with heat pump technologies. And over the customers that responded, only 10% of them said that their contractor mentioned another option or a heat pump as an option of that 10%, or of that subset, in making a decision about whether or not to install the heat pump cost rose to the top, as you know, informing their decision not to install. A lot of these customers also recognize that a lot of things about their home made a heat pump more complicated, or more costly. And then they expressed some concerns about the technology itself. You know, they may have heard that it wasn’t as reliable, or it made the space less comfortable, or it would not have as long like a lifetime. So it was good to gather all that information. Before we got started. And I think my big takeaway from the market research is that we have a huge lift ahead in terms of education, and awareness, both on the contractor side and on the consumer side. Next slide.
Unknown Speaker 27:38
And then this may be a little hard for you to read. But some of the key findings from Apex on their cost benefit analysis. One is one is kind of an obvious but confirming the obvious, and that’s that our buildings contribute in a really big way to our greenhouse gas emissions. And we’ll continue to do so over time. Also, one of the keys to making heat pump technology both for space and water heating. A good economic story is that we have to keep our electricity prices low relative to natural gas so that the economics work out. There they also the work also indicated that partial displacement and what I mean by that you probably already understand this term, but that’s when you we you don’t entirely electrify you have a heat pump. And instead of having electric backup heat, you might have natural gas back at Pete instead. So partial displacement rather than full electric is more economical, and it won’t contribute to a potential winter peak. So overall, it’s kind of it’s better for ratepayers, and I’ll talk about that in a minute. Another outcome of this work and some of the work that they’re doing for Platte River is that full electrification can have a pretty big impact on when our system peaks right now we peak in the summer with our air conditioning load. And over time, depending on the rate of adoption of electric electrification equipment, we can become a winter peaking community. And, you know, the reason that’s important is that in the summertime, our, you know, the, the peak happens at a certain time of day, usually in the afternoon between three and seven, and then it cools off at night. And so our peak drops off. We might ramp up again the next day. But it’s a little more variable, a winter peak is more sustained. You know, think about cold snaps, where we have three or four days in a row that are very cold and it’s very cold at night and it’s very cold during the day. So we have this higher and sustained to peak, which means we have to think about generating more dispatchable energy during that time. So it can be more costly to have peaks in the learn. And finally, I’ll just say that with full electrification, that’s where you’re not doing that partial displacement, it looks like that would add about 10 kW per home during the winter, and that’s when that electric resistance heat kicks on. And with our current difference between summer and winter load, across our system, we have about 15 megawatts of space, which would be about 5000 homes in Longmont will kind of push us to that winter peak.
Unknown Speaker 30:47
Next slide. So not to be discouraged by that, by all that. Apex did provide some recommendations for how we might phase in the work that we want to do with the first phase really, kind of digging in on education, awareness, contractor training, you know, incentivizing our early adopters. And one of the questions that that we want to answer is, what would it take for contractors to almost always install a heat pump, instead of an air conditioner, you know, kind of nail that down in this first phase. And then also, they recommended that we incentivize all heat pumps, not just cold climate, and right now our efficiency works. And I believe boulder Canary counties energy smart, focus on cold climate heat pumps only for that rebates. So you know, kind of getting people used to any kind of heat pump is a good thing. And then then the next phase, we would start building code requirements for new construction, we should look at working with manufacturers and distributors to make sure that the equipment that they’re that they have on hand, and that they’re pushing out into our community is the equipment that we want people to install, so that heat pump equipment. And you know, just to kind of broaden our offerings related to electrification technology. And then that third phase is the real hard push to zero carbon, where we’re looking at, you know, hard and fast code changes, relative to heat pump, space heating, and water heating in all new installations are requiring all electric new homes for construction. And while Apex kind of has it as 2030, and later, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s when it has to happen. They were looking at our code cycles and how we adopt new code. Fortunately, long mine is pretty progressive in that when a new code comes out, we review it, and we adopt it. That’s part of our policy. And so it’s more a matter of code amendments. And when those might happen along the way is as part of our code cycle code adoption cycle. And I some of you may also be familiar with a lot of code work that’s happening right now is sweep and Rmi. They’re they’re good frameworks in place that we can build off of that look in a phased approach to code amendments and code adoption. So we’re keeping those in mind as we move through our plan. Next slide.
Unknown Speaker 33:44
So beyond the work from Apex, Lotus engineering, and sustainability is our consultants facilitating our planning work and the advisory committee. And group 14 is a sub consultant there and is modeling potential impacts from strategies that we might include in our plan. their work, their model considers our baseline emissions, it looks at the building stock in Longmont. It looks at where we’re using natural gas in these buildings, and considers what our current greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals are. And then the beauty of this modeling is it’s a tool that we can use over time, you know, right now for building our plan, but also over time, that allows us to toggle strategy pieces on and off types of policy implementation dates, what kind of level of adoption we think we might see equipment types. So there are a lot of different ways to turn the dial in order to understand better the impacts that we may have. The model also includes you know, those those emissions impacts as benefits and also what the cost implications might be. Next slide. I hope this isn’t too hard for you to see. Excuse me, this is some graphic representation of the building stock analysis that they did. And it lines up with what we’ve seen in our greenhouse gas inventory and some other work that we’ve done. The first two pie charts are a breakdown of building type, either by square footage, or by building count. The square footage wise about 61% are residential. And then by building count, you know, 84% are residential. If you roll in that multifamily piece, you know, we’re looking at almost 93% of our building space is allocated for residential uses. And then, on the natural gas breakout, we’ve got residential accounts for about 62% of our community wide natural gas use, and CNI is about 38%. So essentially, what this does is it kind of helps us focus, you know, where can we get the most impact. Having said that, we don’t want to be exclusive and say we’re only going to focus on residential, because that doesn’t, you know, that doesn’t help us achieve our goals. So we are considering both commercial and residential, but clearly, a lot of our impact is going to come from that residential sector. Another interesting note, is that the majority of buildings in Longmont were built after 1980. And we had our biggest kind of boom between 2002 1009. Again, that gives us a sense for, you know, the the age of our building stock. And you know, what cycle code was happening when a lot of these buildings were made, and what kinds of implications does that have on, you know, insulation and efficiency of envelope as well as electric panel size and that kind of thing. Next slide.
Unknown Speaker 37:19
This is really, really hard
Unknown Speaker 37:20
to read. And I don’t expect you to, to see it well or understand all the parts and pieces, I just wanted to point out some highlights, it’s a little, it’s a little grab from the modeling tool. But I just wanted to show you kind of some of the ways that we can toggle. And your your packet included a list of potential best practices that are being considered for the plan. And not all of those are modeled in the tool, because not all of them are easily quantifiable. But anything that could be quantified in some manner, group 14, included in the model. And so some of the things that we can toggle on and off are different types of strategies on the voluntary and incentive side. You know, we’re looking at partnerships with efficiency programs, we’re looking at no to low interest financing options, book purchase programs, things like that, where we’re trying to encourage voluntary activity. And that’s kind of up in the top left hand corner here. And then over to the right, you see the blue boxes, and there’s a start date, and there’s an adoption rate. And so we can, we can determine whether we want these things to begin in 2023 or 2025. And we think, as a result of our effort, we’re going to get high adoption or medium adoption. Low adoption is kind of a baseline, it’s if we don’t do anything too much different than we’re doing now. Medium is pushing harder in that high adoption is where we’re sort of things are more compulsory, if you will. And then in the lower part there of that screenshot, we’re able to toggle on and off policy paths. You know, the one in the middle here is, you know, we’re going to require that anything, any air conditioning is a heat pump technology. Or we’re looking at, you know, things for existing buildings, if something fails, the new thing that goes in has to be electric. And we’re going to do that by 2025, or whatever. So it lets us it gives us a lot of choice in how we want to set up our scenarios and our strategies. And we just got the final tool and the final memo last week, so we’re kind of digging in to see what it tells us but there are some highlights that I wanted to share with you from the work. Next slide.
Unknown Speaker 39:58
So again, kind of playing waiting out the obvious but confirming that we need to electrify our buildings in order to achieve our greenhouse gas emissions goals. It’s also important that we consider both residential and commercial buildings. But looking at residential for the biggest impact, we also want to make sure that we’re considering both new construction and existing buildings. And then also this partial displacement idea, surfaced again, in that having a heat pump for air conditioning. And for most of the heating, with natural gas for backup on those very coldest days is the most economic option right now. And that cold climate heat pumps with that electric resistance backup so that 100% electrification are recommended for new construction, but not existing buildings yet. And then this was interesting too. And that is that those voluntary strategies where we’re encouraging people to kind of do what we want, it gets us, it helps us save about 10% toward our goal. And so in order to get beyond that, we have to have really good and thoughtful policies that will bring along the rest of the folks to participate so that we can hit our our ultimate goals. Next slide. And, finally, this is the work that Platte River Power Authority is doing. They’re working with all for their owner communities, gathering data from all four owner communities. And what they’re trying to do is project based on certain adoption rates, again, high, medium, low, low being, we don’t really do anything different. We just keep bumping along the way that we are, you know, and medium is, you know, more in centers and bigger education and whatnot, and then high, it’s just where we’re, we’re requiring certain things. So they’re looking at those scenarios as well. And what they’re trying to get a sense for is, at each of these levels, what does that look like in terms of how much electricity we have to generate? And what does it look like, in terms of our distribution system? Where will the vulnerabilities be? What kind of infrastructure will we need to have in place in order to accommodate that electric demand, and, you know, they’re looking at load shapes, both on a monthly and an annual basis based on these projections, and also considering the the type of energy that they’ll need to bring in and that that energy may not be immediately dispatchable. It might be, you know, renewable energy that is going to require some more flexibility in some demand response or behavioral change on our part. They’re also looking really closely at the Winter peaking implications. And then we’re able to take some of their learning and apply it on our distribution, just considering what that’s going to mean, to hosting capacity. And so that’s still underway. We don’t have the final information from Platte River yet another element that needs to play into this. So this particular study is building electrification only. So you think of the implications there. And then you add in the additional implications for Evie charging, which was included here. So there’s, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of study going on, to help us understand what the outcomes of electrification mean, maybe next slide.
Unknown Speaker 44:06
So the next steps for us are to share with you kind of what we know so far, we’re also gathering focus groups. And we’ve got one already behind us. But we have another several coming up. We’re talking to key sectors about their level of awareness and potential impacts that they see whether it’s positive or negative ideas they have for helping us to be as successful as possible with our plan efforts. And then really importantly, how best do we communicate with them and folks in their sector, about the plan implications and how we get those strategies accomplished. We’re continuing to bet the best best practices that were in your packet. We had the opportunity to work with the equitable Climate Action Team To evaluate a couple of those best practices using their equity guide. And this is really important, because we don’t want to overlook important concerns when we’re looking at these best practices. And so that was really helpful to get their feedback on, are we asking the right questions? Are we are there ways to mitigate potential negative impacts. And, you know, we hope to be able to apply what we learned on those few strategies to all the others as well. And as I said, we’re continuing kind of building out the communication strategy based on the things that we want, that we want people to help us do. And we hope to have that plan by August 2022. And I would just say, if any of you, I know this, this group is very plugged in, you’re very informed. And if you have feedback on the best practices that are included in your, in your packet, or if you have questions for me today that I may or may not be able to answer, but I’ll get an answer for you just indefinitely interested in your feedback. And so I’ll open it up for questions.
Unknown Speaker 46:14
Thanks so much. Go ahead, Robert.
Unknown Speaker 46:17
So I was gonna ask about the decision not to recommend the cold climate heat pumps for existing construction retrofit applications. Is that just due to the cost for additional electrical work required to do that? Or what’s kind of the rationale there? It’s a
Unknown Speaker 46:34
variable of, of considerations. So there is the cost of, you know, some, some installations are pretty simple. Because it’s a newer construction, your house is pretty tight, and you’ve got a panel that has capacity. Your ductwork is size big enough, you know, so so it gets more complicated. Oh, you asked about cold climates specifically, though. So yeah, they’re much more expensive. Then then the standard Standard heat pumps. Also, we’re trying to balance, how quickly we get to winter peak. And with the cold climate, heat pumps with electric resistance backup, we’re going to get there faster, which means we have to accommodate that sooner. So so it’s a little bit of this and a little, it’s a little bit of that, but the but the biggest factor is the installation costs, the equipment costs. Charles, and then our
Unknown Speaker 47:40
so yes, so it sounds like probably due to initial installation costs, that the recommendations are really focused on air source heat pumps, as opposed to ground source heat pumps. And it seems to me that a partial replacement, I mean, in some ways, you’re replacing an electrical system with another electrical system. So it’s not truly electrification. Because air conditioning is already electrified. But it’s but the but the air source heat pump for air conditioning is is pretty efficient works really well, it’s it’s cold winter days that you have a big problem. So and there’s there’s problems with partial replacements, you add complexity to the system. And one of the challenges that they mentioned was that these systems are complex. But now you have an even more complex system when you have a partial replacement, because you have a hybrid between you know, gas furnace, and a air source heat pump. So it seems like if we could do anything we can do to me, it seems like anything we could do to incentivize going all the way to ground source heat pump just seems to make sense. I mean, cold climate, air source heat pumps are better than the old heat pumps that gave the pumps a bad name, because of resistive heating costing so much but it Yeah, if but if you if you don’t do a partial displacement and you just do an Air Source Heat Pump installation with supplemental electricity, then winter peak is going to be really bad. So there’s there’s other things maybe we can do to incentivize things like this safety, you know, Heat pumps are safer system than gas furnaces, and I think safety actually, probably is affects lower income parts of the population worse because they have gas furnaces, for example, that are not maintained at the same level or as often. And so they end up getting having problems that could lead to, you know, gas leaks, CO poisoning, fires, etc. So, and just one last thing I was thinking was Have you ever thought of doing anything like having maybe a building permit, like lower fees, where for people who are putting in things that are actually, we want them to do? I mean, we keep. So we keep building buildings using your wood frames, residential construction is wood frames that technology was invented in 1822, which is 200 years old anniversary this year. And it every 18 inches, you have a thermal bridge, which just all that energy you’re putting into, you’re basically transferring heat into or out of your home, depending upon whether it’s summer or winter, you’re letting it leak out through these, you know, through your studs. And there are better building technologies and ways to incentivize that, which would mean that, you know, tighter envelope building envelope. And, yeah, with better monolithic our values across the panel, for example, that saves you a lot in terms of air conditioning. And anyway, so if there are opportunities later, to contribute to this area, I’ve been studying this for the last 25 years or so. So I’d be happy to chat with someone, there’s options for more community input, etc.
Unknown Speaker 51:26
Thanks for your input, Charles and you, you packed a lot in there. One thing I was going to mention that’s come up in our committee meetings is ground source heat pump for campuses, if you will, because then the economy of scale was a little more palatable. And you’re right, you know, then then we sort of eliminate the some of the things that are associated with some of the negatives associated with air source, heat pump, and, you know, certainly encouraging, better built buildings from the beginning, through, you know, rewards of some kind through permitting or, you know, making it easier or faster or less expensive, or certainly things that that we’re considering, and I’m pretty excited. I realize it’s a commercial thing, but at least on the commercial building front with the state’s mandate for benchmarking on buildings larger than 50,000 square feet, there’s going to be a performance element coming. I don’t know when I don’t I guess it’s in the it’s in the bill. But you know, so we’re going to start to have to talk about how buildings perform not only existing, but especially those that are new. So
Unknown Speaker 52:44
those, yeah, that’d be fantastic. Residential, there is no residential. Unfortunately, it’s 50,000 square feet or larger. For residential, there isn’t much there except for just the homeowner saving some money. But the long term cost of ownership of these systems is much lower. And, you know, but the upfront costs are it’s getting people past the upfront cost. And essentially kind of a technological illiteracy about how these things work and what their advantages are. We could do that. That’d be fantastic.
Unknown Speaker 53:17
Yeah, we need to we need to talk these things up and educate more folks. Marsha?
Unknown Speaker 53:26
Yeah, I’ve just got a couple of points. One is that I think we’re going to need to try to make some effort to gather a little more data that we have, then we have so far, maybe locally, you know, my constituent, Shaquille that was such a big pain in terms of his exploration of electrifying his house, ended up doing no solar but Anna displacement architecture, heat pump installation, so he has kept his six month old or six year old gas furnace. And the interesting part of it is that this is an old historic West Side house. You know, so we’re going to have lots of use cases involved as he goes forward. And he is willing to to take one of those copper appliances that measures your gas usage by by listening to your old gas meter, oh, kind of the clamp on thing, no, it plugs it actually plugs into an outlet inside your house. But what it does is, you know, an analog gas meter just goes ping, ping, ping, ping with RF every time that the virtual wheel turns over right. And so it can I have one in my house and I know how much my gas usage fluctuates based On temperature outdoors, and he’s willing to take one of those because what he’s got is now an external ducted air source heat pump, installed in conjunction with his gas furnace and a smart thermostat that is that cuts over from heat pump to gas when the external temperature is 20. Fahrenheit. So, you know, I’m maybe we can, you know, do my copper is complimentary, but we’re trying to work out a chip change, but maybe there’s something that we could do about using those to gather data if we subsidize them with the company. So I think that’s going to be really important information to be able to supply to people. The other thing that I was just thinking about is situation like mine, where I have a gas furnace that is pretty old. And if I went for a displacement, architecture what what would I expect to happen to the future life of my gas furnace? You know, would it? Would it fall apart immediately because it wasn’t being used? Or would it last a long time, because it was only being used a little bit? That’s something that we would like to know, in terms of encouraging people to, to make the switch? So, you know, I just think that as we go forward, there are all kinds of of important things that we need to figure out. And I really liked the way, you know, Charles was, was thinking about this, because sounds like he’s been in the business of learning those things. So that’s my two cents. Well,
Unknown Speaker 57:01
and there, there is so much to know about this. And I appreciate that both you and Charles brought up the the nature of controls when you have these partial systems where you have, you know, it only works if the controls are functioning correctly and the switchover temperatures happen at the right time. And, you know, that’s an that’s a new thing for our contractor. Cool. So yeah.
Unknown Speaker 57:25
Adam, Oh, and before you go on next first, I also wanted to say, you know, the local social media has ads for H fac people. And I’ve been going around asking them if they do need pumps in there all claiming they do. Okay, we’ll see.
Unknown Speaker 57:44
Let’s take them up on it.
Unknown Speaker 57:48
Adam, real quick, I want to jump in and just, we’ve got a really full agenda after this. After Adam and Jim. Let’s call questions to an end, please.
Unknown Speaker 58:01
I actually have to go. So. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 58:05
I’ll make my question. Quick. Thanks a lot, Susan, for the talk. Regarding the PRP as forecasts for the grid. As more buildings electrified it’s going to be, of course, more demand for electricity. And so do they have a forecast for how the energy mix will evolve?
Unknown Speaker 58:22
Well, they they have the forecast that’s in the IRP. But I think the work that they’re doing now will also inform the next revision to the IRP so that they know better what it is they’re, you know, what the thresholds are, they’re going to have to mean and where that’s going to come from. So no, I don’t I don’t know what that looks like yet. But I’m sure that’s part of their thinking as they revise the IRP. Okay, well, thanks again for for letting me join you today. I appreciate it.
Unknown Speaker 58:55
Really appreciate you being here. That was great presentation. Thanks for all of the information.
Unknown Speaker 59:01
Thank you reach out with any input or feedback that you have happy to take it. Perfect.
Unknown Speaker 59:07
Thank you. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 59:10
Okay, um, well, now it’s time for the Zero Waste update. Lisa.
Unknown Speaker 59:18
Thanks. I’ll be pretty quick. Heather, can you pull up that presentation for me real quick,
Unknown Speaker 59:22
please.
Unknown Speaker 59:27
Did you get it? Okay, great. Thanks. Um, yeah, so you can go to the next slide, Heather. Thanks. I just wanted to give you a quick update since we went to council last night to give them an update on where our zero waste efforts are at and just give you all a sense of the timeline moving forward. So just a quick reminder the four areas that council has given us direction to pursue additional Zero Waste efforts on we’re the education and outreach piece, which is mostly our relationship with eco cycle and savory Valley School District and supporting the green Star Schools Program, increasing hard to recycle opportunities for hard to recycle programs, updating the existing 2008, zero waste resolution with additional focus areas and specific targets, and then exploring a universal recycling ordinance and what all that might include. Next slide, please. Some quick updates just on the accomplishments, so our target from the sustainability plan in the residential sector is 50%. Diversion by 2025. As of the end of 2020 2021, we’re at about 42%. So we’re doing pretty well on that goal. We don’t yet have targets specifically in the commercial sector, which is part of what we’ll be looking at in this process. But on the residential side, we’re doing pretty well. Next slide. And then specifically with the composting program, if you all recall, I think some of you were around a number of years ago when we that wasn’t that long ago, I guess. But about five years ago, I think when we instituted the curbside composting program, the sustainability Advisory Board, had some conversations and had written some recommendations to city council on that, whether it should be opt in or opt out Council initially, or approved an opt in curbside composting program, we had some analysis from somebody that we work with, it does a lot of data and economic analysis, specifically in the waste sector, who told us with an opt in program, we would probably get about 25% participation. And so we’re at about 24%. Now, so we are seeing that kind of leveling off. So we can definitely there, we were still getting subscriptions for that we still promote that quite heavily. But we may be hitting our limit, kind of with an opt in program. Next slide, please. And then hard to recycle services. As I mentioned, increasing those opportunities, were a focus area of Council. And so Charlie communities, our sanitation manager, organized this event that that happened in October. So it was initially an interim strategy of looking at different options. And so he worked with some external partners to put together a two week event that was held in October that was really successful, took a number of different items, we had a lot of participation. And so we got some direction from council to, to consider or to continue looking at that consider potentially, some biannual programs, but also to continue to explore other opportunities for hard to recycle services, because we know that that’s a need. And it’s not always easily accessible for folks to get to the Boulder County term facility. So we are still looking for longer term solutions in that area. Next slide, please. The Green Star school program. So that’s a partnership that we do with eco cycle, they have a great curriculum that they’ve put together. We’re currently working with 11 Out of the 27 schools, or 11, out of the 27 schools are in the GreenStar Schools program. And we are the city is funding two additional schools per year. And then the st. Green Valley School District funds in additional school per year, although that can be anywhere within the district. So sometimes that’s going to fall in in within the boundaries of Longmont. And sometimes obviously that’ll fall into other communities. But the two schools that the city funds per year will fall specifically within Longmont. And so they do staff trainings. They work with students, they work with parents, they have a whole curriculum. Five years after school is launched, they go back and do a whole revamp they do the data tracking and all of that sort of stuff. So it’s a successful program in partnership. Next slide, please.
Unknown Speaker 1:03:54
And then the Zero Waste resolution. So I chatted with you all about this a couple months ago, I think it was back in the fall of last year, we were initially planning to kick off community engagement for the updated Zero Waste resolution last fall. But as you all know, we’re down a couple of staff so but just a quick reminder for folks, the original resolution was passed in 2008. On the left hand side is just a very high level outline. And the areas in gray were included in the initial resolution. And the areas in green are the areas that we want to incorporate into the update. We also want to include some specific targets. So not only our target from the existing sustainability plan, but look at some more ambitious targets and include a specific commercial target, and then really focus on community engagement, as well as data analysis to help us inform the content of the Zero Waste resolution. So really our high level goals and commitments, but then also the details of the universal recycling ordinance which is having specific requirements in place for everyone residential and the commercial sector as well. So Please, just some high level guiding principles that everybody lives in a clean and safe community. We want to increase access to recycling and composting for everyone. And then reducing waste supports our climate action goals. Next one. The community centered engagement piece as I mentioned, this is an important component to make sure that we understand the needs and priorities of the community as well as potential equity issues. So we want to engage the residential sector key partners. So folks like advisory boards, sustainable resilient Longmont, Boulder County partners for clean environment, recycle Colorado, as well as have conversations with peer communities that have done some great Zero Waste work that we can really learn from their expertise. And then also our city staff as well. So from various departments who are impacted by or also have a role in supporting our zero waste efforts. And then specific targeted outreach to the commercial and multifamily sector again, who will be most impacted by a universal recycling ordinance, and use all of that community engagement information for both the resolution and the ordinance at Sun. So as I mentioned, we’ll also be doing some data analysis in this process. So if you’ll recall a couple years ago, we did a waste lifecycle analysis to look specifically at how waste impacts our greenhouse gas emissions. And we looked at two different target scenarios within that one that’s less ambitious, and one that’s more ambitious. And so we’d be doing some data analysis to understand what are the potential programs and policies we would need to put in place to meet both of these scenarios? And what would the cost associated with those be so that that can also help inform what we put into place? Excellent. And then some key dates. So the first quarter of the year, January through March really is our community engagement phase, April and main will be drafting a resolution and bringing that back to key partners for feedback. So we have it on, on the agenda for me to bring you all a draft resolution to review and provide feedback with the goal of bringing that draft resolution to council in June. And then we’ll continue to focus on more refined engagement with the commercial and multifamily sector for the universal recycling ordinance to make sure that we’re we’re capturing and phasing things appropriately and that with the goal of having that back to city council by the end of the year. So with that, that’s all I have for you all just wanted to give you an update of where things are at and to keep an eye out for the community engagement opportunities. We launched it can engage Longmont page, and we’ll have some other opportunities that will keep you all apprised of and then have that draft resolution for you all to review in May. Does anyone have any questions before we move on?
Unknown Speaker 1:07:55
Yeah. I’m curious about the composting, opt in versus opt out? Is there any desire from council to change that to an opt out?
Unknown Speaker 1:08:12
Yeah, there is desire for that. There’s definitely constraints for us to doing that. But I think that’ll be part of what we’re evaluating in this in this process. Marsha, did you want to jump in there? No, me no.
Unknown Speaker 1:08:33
You’re ago all right. I have not, we didn’t really take a vote last night. So they’re, I think the main expressed interest mine and a couple others who has been not putting any rate burdens. Any more rate burdens on the public for a while, because we’ve raised the rates on everything. In the last four years, you know, and we’ve got the water rates going up step wise, because of the new waste treatment plant. We’ve got the smart meters, which are going to cause rates to increase a little bit for a while. And, you know, I hope we’ll be able to do things to counteract that once the smart meters are allowing us to do font design creative raid structures, but for a while we need to stay off the public because we’re getting a lot of of complaints. So you know, that’s that’s my position on it. And I think that the way to go would be to a, you know, encourage the public to throw away less stuff. reuse a lot more And, and use the, you know, the pay as you throw options that we’ve already got to reduce their waste diversion expenses, I know I’m on the cheapest plan that you can get that involves composting. And, and, and I you know, my compost bin is only full twice a year. So you know, I’m really only in that because of of, you know, out of out of local patriotism or something. But I don’t have any trouble getting along with every two weeks little carton for landfill. And if it could be done, you know, so I think that that, you know, communication is the best way and, and not doing anything that’s going to cause rates to go up. But like I said, that’s that’s me. I think two other council members expressed the same sentiment but you know, sustainable resilient Longmont wants everybody to pay for, you know, approaching zero waste much faster. So, if we did take a vote, I don’t know where we would go with it. Just
Unknown Speaker 1:11:24
yeah. And that’s where that data analysis piece, I think will be really important for us to be able to say if we do want to increase those targets, what what would it require in order for us to get there from you know, what are the recommended policies and programs? And what would the cost associated with that be and then it will be a decision for council to decide, you know, what, what do we want to go with, given the bigger picture that that Councilmember Marsha, Councilmember Mertens is talking about with regards to the whole sweep of rain impacts
Unknown Speaker 1:11:54
to the community? Good. Call me councilmember Marsh, Councilmember
Unknown Speaker 1:11:58
Marsha. I like that person.
Unknown Speaker 1:12:04
I just want to throw it. We have I have a family of four. And we have been on every other week trash since we moved here, and have never ever had to go throw our trash and somebody else has been.
Unknown Speaker 1:12:17
It’s totally doable. Sorry. Okay.
Unknown Speaker 1:12:21
I would say right now, right now I’m on the big trash again, because I’m trying to clear out my house and purge, but that I’m going to go back to small later because we did that for three years without a problem. As far as the compost goes, I, the one thing about the opt in is right now you have the buying of the people who are excited about the program who are going to be diligent about what they’re putting in there. As a person on the sustainability board, I shouted out the front door to my husband, you have to take the garbage bag off the leaves. Because we just left our leaves sitting in garbage bags on the front lawn and have not gotten them down to the city compost. So they’ve been going slowly in the bins of all the neighbors. But I was gonna say that some one thing to consider before you go, like, the good part about the opt in is you’re getting the clean compost. If you guys go to the, you know, you know, it’s on everybody’s one issue is going to be where’s everybody in his store this extra huge bin. So you know, it might be something where you have to find another small compost bin to handle smaller items, or encourage things like more cardboard or something which may or may not be great, because it’s so dry. Um, that might as far as compost goes, I’m thinking they might make things more difficult if they get overloaded of paper versus the the foods and the green products. So there has to be a conscious effort when it comes to that actually implementing the compost. And that’s kind of a big a big part of, you know, yeah, we want people doing it. But when we do consider that, I guess consider how much separation has to occur at the facility, and if that’s going to be a burden to them, and what kind of increase in fees, they’re going to have to be pulling out my husband’s garbage bags that are landing in my compost. Really. So I’m like that, and that’s that I’m going that’s in my own house and I’m sitting here on the board. So, um, you know, I there’s plenty of times where I’ve seen the recycle go in that one and had to sit there and and take it out. I mean, it is it’s a rough one, you know, if my kids would know, because I you know, but anyway, and he’s getting better, but it’s a learning process. And so so that’s just one thing is when you get to you know, I’m supporting the by the the opt in program, I think it’s great. I could be something where if you you could you could offer people a one month trial or something of it. If you do do it in the fall when people are pruning. You know, something like that might attract people to being like, Oh, this is actually easy. I can do a lot with this. You know, but that some ideas, I think it’s good as an opt in program, I’d love to see more people doing it. I think the bins breed, but also I picture some of those multi family homes where you drive by on like 17th Avenue. And it’s just a row of recycle, recycle trash, recycle trash, recycle trash. And it’s like, it’s hard enough to get the landlord’s to get into the recycling, let alone now and tell them to add a third bin for everyone. And that’s, that’s so that’s one thing is I think we might have to look at smaller, smaller vessels for multifamily housing, at least. There’s some things to consider down the road. I love it. But you know, it was all over my coat this morning when I rip those bags over open. And I think one of my neighbors had two bags to go from his own yard. And he kind of looked at me like, What are you doing?
Unknown Speaker 1:15:58
Well, I thanks for all of those perspectives. I seriously, okay, I love I love the perspectives that you bring to my comments. And I’m like, Oh, well, that’s a good way to look at I’m like,
Unknown Speaker 1:16:15
I was gonna say I suddenly slip family households where, you know, that, you know, we’re remotes I colored in those home as far as politically
Unknown Speaker 1:16:31
and, you know, so
Unknown Speaker 1:16:36
I should take that off the record
Unknown Speaker 1:16:38
was good. Other thoughts on the Zero Waste presentation in general? It was great, though. It was.
Unknown Speaker 1:16:50
Thank you. Yeah, I do want to make sure we have enough time. Adams up next with those kind of arrests that Oh, yeah. Sorry, Robert. Go ahead.
Unknown Speaker 1:16:57
Oh, I was gonna say is that I think encouraging as much participation as we can at the education level at the school children level is the way to go to reach these objectives. They they make a difference, I believe. Yeah. It’s a really good point.
Unknown Speaker 1:17:15
Um, okay. But before we get to Adam, so we have other business, but I don’t think anybody has. But we do have something that you wanted to add, Lisa, from staff.
Unknown Speaker 1:17:27
Oh, yeah, sorry about that. Just just really quickly. So believe it was councilmember waters. And councilmember Mercer you can correct me if I’m wrong, but thought that it would be good for board members to be more involved in the interview process when new new board applicants come through. And so we are going to be pursuing that process this year. And so board recruitment opened in March and the timeline that we have set out to still follow City Council’s timeline to make sure they can interview applicants and get people on in in the appropriate timing. We would bring board interviews to you all in our May, in our main meeting. And we can put this on a different meeting to discuss the details, but I just wanted to put it on your radar. It doesn’t need to be the whole board that participates in that. It could be a subcommittee, it could be the board chair and the staff liaison. You all can decide who you think should be responsible for doing that doing those interviews. But then we’ll send those recommendations that you all have on who who you think are the top candidates for to fill new board positions to council, and then they will still go through the appointment process. So Council will still appoint those folks. The energy? Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 1:18:46
Yeah, I would just say I think the whole council is on board with having the boards filter so that we interview fewer applicants, because it’s kind of insulting, you know, you guys are really heavy hitters in your in your area of interest. And then you get a five minute interview. You know, we hate doing that to you guys. So, you know, it’s really more like a we all want to reform this process. We just are not doing a very good job of agreeing on how to get it done.
Unknown Speaker 1:19:20
So this, I think is a trial year. We’ll see how it goes. Things may change in the future. But I just wanted to let you all know, so it didn’t just come up out of the blue, especially because when those records the recruitment will open before your March meeting. So just
Unknown Speaker 1:19:39
wait, Charles has a question. Oh, sorry.
Unknown Speaker 1:19:41
Yeah, just real quick. I wanted to apologize to the group and especially to Adam. I’m going to have to leave at five and it’s Boulder County Community Advisory Committee, and we’re talking about the redesign of the airport 119 intersection, so I don’t want to miss that. So it’s nice Few boards, unfortunately, conflict so sorry, Adam. I will be leaving shortly.
Unknown Speaker 1:20:05
No worries, Charles. Heather, do you want to queue up the slides now?
Unknown Speaker 1:20:11
Sure. Give me one second.
Unknown Speaker 1:20:13
Sure. I’m so excited about this presentation.
Unknown Speaker 1:20:17
And well, Adam does that I’m going to he’s going to share his screen. But I’m going to keep an eye on folks. So I might, but in everyone small to let Adam know if there’s a question because he might not be able to see everyone and I’m
Unknown Speaker 1:20:28
so just, actually, Heather, could you jump to the first line? Wonderful. So thanks, everyone, for giving me an opportunity to present what’s called an endurance climate workshop. These workshops typically last well over an hour. However, for our board meeting, we obviously don’t have that time. So I’m going to condense it to about 30 minutes, just to check how much time do we have available left?
Unknown Speaker 1:21:00
37 minutes.
Unknown Speaker 1:21:03
Okay. Well, in the interest of time, I’ll ask that we try to hold questions until the end unless you have any quick clarification ones. Next. For this workshop, we’ll use an interactive tool called inroads, which was developed by Climate Interactive, a leading energy and climate think tank that grew out of the MIT Sloan sustainability initiative. Next, here’s today’s agenda, I’ll provide a very brief introduction to n rows explaining what it is and why we should care about it. And then we’ll jump right into running and roads together, creating our own scenario in which we aim to limit warming well below two degrees Celsius. And at the end, we’ll have a quick debrief, and which we reflect as a group on our experience together next. So the introduction, what is inroads? Next, you can keep it on the next one. Thanks, Heather. And rose is a global climate policy simulator that enables users to explore their own scenarios up to the end of the century. I’ll note that androids is built using the best available science, and it’s freely available online for anyone to use. When you’re looking at here is a screenshot of the front panel at Rhodes, as you can see it in your browser. I’ll explain more about this later in the introduction. Next. But first, why should we care about androids in short, animals is a very powerful tool that helps encourage people to take effective action by improving their understanding of climate change and what we can do about it. Here in Longmont, the cities taking multiple climate actions that impact many things like our energy mix, air quality economy, and several areas depicted below. Where emeralds comes in is that it helps ground our conversations about these actions in the best available science so that we can ensure our actions are equitable and high leverage. Next I’ll note that these androids climate workshops are happening all over the world. So far, there been over 100,000 participants in 94 countries, and the participation continues to grow. So let’s get going. Let’s run and roads next. Next, I would like to first get you oriented with androids when you first open up and roads, this is what you see this in the front panel. And next. On the top left, you can see the energy sources that we use each year on the bottom and brown and coal is coal, red is oil, blue is gas. Green are the renewables, bioenergy and nuclear at the top next. And at the bottom, there are 18 sliders that enable you to apply various climate actions that impact things like our energy mix and land use next. And I’ll point out that these three dots take you to a menu that allows you to apply some more advanced options and gain more information about the action. And we’ll explore that when we interact with inroads. Next. And on the top left, you can see how our actions impact the global temperature increase by the end of the century. I want to emphasize that what you’re looking at is the baseline scenario in which we take minimal additional action. That is we don’t really alter the sliders. In this case, greenhouse gases, gases continue to grow, leading to a dramatic temperature rise by the end of the century. Next. So today’s goal, we’re going to create a scenario that aims to limit warming well below two degrees Celsius. So let’s jump in. Actually, Heather, can you go to the next slide? And I’ll ask everyone as we run and Rhodes I would like you to also think about the CO benefits of these climate actions as well as their equity considerations. And I’ll highlight how and roads ties into both of these. So at this point, I will share my screen and pull up and roads
Unknown Speaker 1:25:02
So at this point, you should see the N roads front panel. And what I’d like to do is have you think about some of the actions that we’ve talked about, like today building electrification, and think about how we can apply that in and roads. And I want you to make a guess about how that will impact temperature. This is important not to show that anyone is wrong or anything, but rather to strengthen our mental models of this complex energy, land climate economic system. So with that, I’ll open it up and welcome anyone to propose an action to take.
Unknown Speaker 1:25:45
Let’s reduce the coal.
Unknown Speaker 1:25:47
Wonderful. So what I could do is move the coal slider to the left. And what that corresponds to is putting a bunch of taxes on coal, for example. And I’d like to know what do you think that will do to the final temperature?
Unknown Speaker 1:26:02
I hope that it will increase or decrease the final temperature, I hope.
Unknown Speaker 1:26:08
What is the alternative? If you decrease coal, you have to increase something else? That’s a really good question. And we’ll, we’ll examine that as well. So, Kate, just want to check what it quantitatively What do you think will happen to the temperature?
Unknown Speaker 1:26:23
I think that the temperature is going to go down.
Unknown Speaker 1:26:28
by point one degree, oh, I don’t know. Take it take a guess it’s okay. Not to put the spotlight on you. Half.
Unknown Speaker 1:26:35
I’ll think I was gonna vote for point four or a full degree then. Okay. So I, I’m anti coal.
Unknown Speaker 1:26:45
Okay, so we’re anti coal here, I’m going to assume that means we apply a very large tax ridicul. Yeah, get rid of coal. So what we saw here is the temperature decrease. And what we can do is click this button to replay the last change. Oh, neat. So there was a question something else is going to change? Uh huh. So can anyone guess? What do you think is going to happen to the other look to the energy banks? Short term increase in natural gas? Sure. Any others?
Unknown Speaker 1:27:22
I mean, let’s add some renewables
Unknown Speaker 1:27:23
here.
Unknown Speaker 1:27:24
Yeah, let’s, so what I’ll point you to are these drop down menus where you can go and take a look at, for example, the primary energy demand types. And let’s look at coal. So coals dropping, that’s, that’s what we wanted. Now, let’s look at natural gas. Ah, so we increased natural gas a little bit. We call this effect like squeeze the bloom, we are reducing one. One thing like coal, and then you’re getting a lot more something else natural gas. And I’ll ask Can you think of a coke benefit to reducing coal?
Unknown Speaker 1:28:07
Air quality,
Unknown Speaker 1:28:08
better recall exactly. So I’ll point out in the advanced vent, you can click on these three dots, and we’re going to go doesn’t look like it’s there. I’m going to take you Sorry about that. To this plot, you can click on impacts and go to air pollution. So what you’re looking at is a plot of particulate matter, it’s decreasing as well. So this is an example of a co benefit of cutting coal. Now, I’ll go back to the natural gas demand. What is another consequence you can think of of having more natural gas?
Unknown Speaker 1:28:55
More fracking, more fracking? And
Unknown Speaker 1:28:57
what is more fracking lead to? A girl? She’s pardon earthquakes? Earthquakes, yeah. Air quality issues. Air quality air quality. What else comes with fracking and natural gas infrastructure?
Unknown Speaker 1:29:17
Oil fine for water use.
Unknown Speaker 1:29:19
water use. That’s that’s a good one. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of androids capturing that one. But that’s it. That’s a good point to bring up. What about in terms of extra emissions?
Unknown Speaker 1:29:35
I think that most of that’s actually captured but
Unknown Speaker 1:29:39
um so then the equipment
Unknown Speaker 1:29:46
like Is that Is that what you’re saying? The extra mile from like doing the
Unknown Speaker 1:29:50
actual drilling. Yeah. And just thinking broadly about using more natural gas. What is a consequence of doing that?
Unknown Speaker 1:30:04
The normal co2 emissions of combustion. But that’s kind of the baseline for all the fossil fuels. Right?
Unknown Speaker 1:30:12
That’s right. I mean, I think coal has this as well, but I’m not what I’m trying to get you out is, when using hundreds, I encourage you to look at these plots and see what other kinds of impacts there could be. And I’ll just guide you toward that. We looked at air pollution. What we can also do is look at greenhouse gas emissions, and what kind of gases do you think would be associated with more natural gas? You should it’s I don’t know. Hi. Okay. Oh,
Unknown Speaker 1:30:49
I I’m I mean to say I’m very familiar with the process, because I do work for the oil and gas industry. And I’ve seen all their processes, and they’re tightening it up pretty good out there as far as what actually comes off on natural gas. Yeah. And
Unknown Speaker 1:31:01
that’s what I want to get your attention. Oh, sorry. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 1:31:05
I want I want to say that I’m natural gas, it’s pretty efficiently burning, and they have they have very good methane recovery systems. And they’ll flare that off. Nowadays, it’s changed quite a bit with the new air regulations on how natural gas is produced. So I would look and say there should probably not be a big dip, or not a big increase in in the emissions. Much more than the proportional, it won’t, it shouldn’t skyrocket. Um, I’m curious as to why oil where it says oil for energy. Is that like burning oil?
Unknown Speaker 1:31:44
Yeah. So I’ll dress this year. That
Unknown Speaker 1:31:48
sounds kind of dirty. Yeah. So I’ll just
Unknown Speaker 1:31:52
closure here. And I’ll point out that, in addition to looking at greenhouse gas emissions, you can look at methane emissions and others. But in the interest of time, I’m just gonna plow for we we now want to take action on oil. Yeah. Just to move us along. I know, this feels like we’re going through it quickly. But in the interest of time, I want to try to explore as many of these actions as we can. And with oil, do you want to get rid of that as well? In other words, tax it heavily?
Unknown Speaker 1:32:22
Yes, sir. Bill for it. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 1:32:25
What do you think that’ll do to temperature again? Goal is to strengthen our mental models.
Unknown Speaker 1:32:32
Again, another half a degree Celsius? Sorry?
Unknown Speaker 1:32:35
I hope it does.
Unknown Speaker 1:32:37
Okay, so again, we’re gonna we’re gonna take oil and move it far over, we’re guessing something like a boarder half a degree Celsius. So let’s cut that down. There we go. Oh. Yeah, it is. And you can see here that the oil usage is going down, but what else? Are you noticing? Play it again.
Unknown Speaker 1:33:05
Play it again. What’s the well,
Unknown Speaker 1:33:12
renewables are growing, renewables are growing? And how good why? Why do you think that is still the same demand? Yeah. And what I want to point you to, right now we’re getting at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. If you want to look at the main drivers of greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector, you can look at what are called these Kaia graphs. And here, they basically break down this problem. And two main drivers that are population consumption, energy intensity of our economy, the carbon intensity. So when you multiply all these together, you get the total co2 emissions from our energy. And what you can see here is that when we start cutting out these fossil fuels, we’re cutting out the energy intensity of our final of our of our energy sources. And what I’m gonna do is draw your attention this little house, you can go back to the main screen. And we’ll just keep marching forward action, sorry that I keep kind of
Unknown Speaker 1:34:21
touched on the energy intensity, can you give the quick description of what that would mean?
Unknown Speaker 1:34:29
Yeah, so this is how much co2 We emit for a given unit of energy. And so as we start removing coal, oil and gas, we lower the energy intensity and thus reduce the overall emissions from the energy sector. And one way to see this we can go to these plots here, I’m going to go to the primary energy demand types, and we can look at renewable demand. You can see here the renewable demand is built going up. And you can ask a few questions like, why is that? Well, from a cost perspective, you can go down here and look at financial and go to the market price of electricity. Oh, sorry. The market cost of wind and solar. You can see here that it’s starting to draw.
Unknown Speaker 1:35:27
Adam, this, this tool looks fantastic. I’ll, I’ll say I don’t believe this part of it. I think that the adoption of renewables is going to grow exponentially and not linearly. And we’re already seeing that. So I think this is great. But I’m more optimistic than what this tool projects.
Unknown Speaker 1:35:45
Yeah, Charles, that’s a really good point. And I’ll point out that also has historical data in there from the IEA, for example, about the marginal cost of solar electricity. And so you can take a look at that and how it dropped substantially since 1990. As well, as there’s another thing I’ll point out, and oh, sorry, yeah, you bring up demand, we can look at the historical demands for wind and solar. And, you know, Charles, you also bring up another point that I want to highlight about the simulator is that if there’s something that you’re concerned about, with, say, the assumptions in it, you can go to the simulation, and go to assumptions. And you can address various aspects of the models assumptions, for example, like climate sensitivity, or HERE WE GO renewable subsidies, and some other aspects about the model. And, you know, just in the interest of time, I don’t want to dig into that. But I really appreciate that question, because it shows that this model is just helping us explore what the actions have under, say, various impacts like greenhouse gas emissions and temperature relative to a baseline so you can get a sense of how they are high leverage or low leverage is not necessarily out there to make very accurate predictions. So there’s this trade off in modeling space here. It’s meant to be fast and easy to use, so that you can gain that intuition. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 1:37:19
yeah, that’s a I definitely can see how you have to do that. That totally makes sense. It’s just sometimes hard to estimate the the effects, especially with feedback loops, and things like that, of, of something that’s fundamentally exponential. And so, yeah, yeah, this is great. And a great start. And I would, I’m just hoping that, uh, that those exponentials continue the way we’ve been seeing them.
Unknown Speaker 1:37:44
I agree, I look forward to that. And I’ll point you to documentation for this model, they do have a 400 Plus page document where they outline the model. It’s basically this systems dynamic model, that it takes into account feedback loops, various inputs, and some of those assumptions that I showed you can actually change. But that’s already getting into like, the way advanced stuff. And and I will underscore that really appreciate those questions are really good questions to ask about this. And maybe I’ll just point out and emphasize, I’m not encouraging folks to say, hey, the model says we need to do this, therefore, we need to do it. The main goal here is to strengthen our mental models, play with this tool, explore some of these actions. So you can distinguish what are high and low leverage actions and see what are useful complementary policies that can help out. So I’m going to do is get us back on track, I’m going to reset the graphics and try to get us applying more actions so we can march toward our goal of getting well below two degrees Celsius.
Unknown Speaker 1:38:53
So sorry, I’m curious about deforestation,
Unknown Speaker 1:38:58
deforestation. Okay. So let’s stop the rate at which we’re cutting down trees. And again, this is a global model. So it’s not just, you know, here in the United States, but it’s also assuming, say, in Brazil, for example, lowering the deforestation there. So I’m gonna bet max that out, what do you think it’s going to do to temperature?
Unknown Speaker 1:39:20
I think maybe another half a degree off
Unknown Speaker 1:39:24
half a degree. Okay, I’m going to max out the forestation. Just just a little bit. So if you want to explore the why to that we can do again, go to these plots. And again, I encourage you to use this as a tool to coax you into the state where you’re asking questions like why didn’t have as big of an impact as I thought it would have. And you can poke around and say, let’s look at co2 emissions. And you can look at a sorry, let’s see So you can look at, let’s see. Oh, sorry, it’s under this one, co2 emissions and removals. And so here, you can look at the rate at which we emit co2 into the atmosphere relative compared to the rate at which we remove it. And, huh, yeah. What if you increase the technological carbon recapture approach substantially? Yeah, that’s that’s a good one. You hear a lot about the news about direct air capture and mineralization and things like that. And so do you want to be very optimistic about it and apply that action? Yes. Okay. Charles is gonna invent something and save us all.
Unknown Speaker 1:40:44
Okay, I wish I have a project on that. I’m very pessimistic.
Unknown Speaker 1:40:48
Okay. Well, yeah, let’s so what do you think is gonna do to temperature? I think it’ll be big. If we can, if you can really be successful at it. Do you think go get it? Just throw a number out there? Let’s go. A point seven Celsius, one, seven. And what do you think it’ll do to the red curve? That is the co2. Oh, sorry, the removals? Yeah, I’m assuming it’s going to get much, much closer. Yeah. So I’m going to max this out. Hey, there we go. So had an impact. I’ll show you an example what this Advanced menu looks like. What you can do is look into some of the details here. So not just applying these random amounts. Here, it says high growth. You can be quantitative about it and use detailed settings, like for example, specify bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or how much direct air capture. And on the right, you can look at related graphs like here, it’s how much co2 removed, we remove per year. You can also say, Well, okay, how much say, material we need from a mineralization, if we use that for carbon capture, and like how much land so these graphs here, again, are not meant to be predictions, but they’re forcing us to think a little bit more quantitatively about this problem. Think about the senses of scale involved. So I think we have roughly five minutes left, I’m going to have a five minute debriefing session. So I’ll keep us moving forward. What other actions would you like to apply?
Unknown Speaker 1:42:35
Let’s let’s crank up some of that. Electrification since we had that rectification. Let’s, let’s hit that electrification. See what happens. Okay. I’ve got $1 on point 2% point 2.2 degrees. If you Maximo about
Unknown Speaker 1:42:53
electrify, the transport sector that is increased the fraction of electric cars. Okay, and what about buildings that as well? Yeah. What do you think it’s gonna do to our energy mix? Labor’s gonna keep using more natural gas. I think it’s, I think we got to crank up nuclear at the same time. Okay. So and renewables, we
Unknown Speaker 1:43:15
haven’t cranked up renewal, right? Yeah, let’s crank out some new balls and nucleotides.
Unknown Speaker 1:43:19
Okay, let’s do one at a time. But I’m going to max out electrification. What is, ooh, no, buildings is a much bigger deal than transportation. So, again, I’m going to go back to this reset graphs, just to get us back back to where we were we were at the home screen now. And I think someone brought up a demand for natural gas. So we can answer that question. And it shows that there is a little bit of an increase in that demand. But at the same time, we also saw we can go to renewables. And what we’re seeing is a larger demand for renewables. And I think someone brought up nuclear. Do we want to apply that actually just max it out?
Unknown Speaker 1:44:11
I’m curious. Sure. It’s gonna be super expensive, but go for it.
Unknown Speaker 1:44:15
Okay. Is it gonna be a panacea? Is it gonna be our silver bullet that takes us to below two degrees Celsius? No, no. Okay. Yeah, I hope not. I
Unknown Speaker 1:44:29
hope we need some renewables in there.
Unknown Speaker 1:44:32
So I’m going to slide up nucular.
Unknown Speaker 1:44:35
I like how we’re just going all extreme.
Unknown Speaker 1:44:38
Right. That is, yeah, there’s no balance. Now. I’ll point out. These workshops do last a long time and we can dig in and be more quantitative about what it means to say, tax coal at a very high amount. We can debate those numbers, but there is an advantage to going to the extremes like this because you can then get a little bit more of a sense of how His actions impact the temperature, you can see which ones are high leverage and low leverage and how they affect each other. So what did you notice when we added more nuclear? What happened to our mix? Nuclear renewables, right? Yeah, it’s crowding out the energy market. So that’s, that’s an example of some some of the dynamics that you see in this. Again, it’s not meant to predict exactly what’s going to happen, but give you some sense of the dynamics of this this energy climate system. Really briefly, I do you want to cover on some other aspects of this Advanced menu, you can click on the information. And it sort of serves as a little cheat sheet where it gives you some examples of discouraging or encouraging nuclear or any other these actions, a big message, like hear the author’s point out that it’s not a huge driver of future temperature, because it’s competing with the growth of renewables and highlight some key dynamics, some potential co benefits, as well as equity considerations, like for example, how mining can pose some health risks. And they have this information for each one of these 18 options. And so I kind of view this as like a little cheat sheet, if you will, for understanding these actions. So if you ever want more information, you can click there. Anyway. So we are almost there. Adam. Adam, Can
Unknown Speaker 1:46:31
I do one quick thing? I like that I’m sticking around just because it’s so good. I really, I want to go all Ronald Reagan and go for high energy efficient buildings,
Unknown Speaker 1:46:41
high energy efficient buildings. Yes. That’s
Unknown Speaker 1:46:45
it. And after that, I want to plant some trees, but only about 50. But what
Unknown Speaker 1:46:49
about the renewables? Y’all? We’re gonna maximize energy efficiency. Will that take us below two degrees? Yes. Yes. It’s gonna be good. Yeah. Okay, this is the moment. We are at two degrees. And let’s go back and look at our Caya graphs. Not only do we reduce the carbon intensity of our energy, but we reduce the energy intensity of our economy. Yeah. So again, this is this is just two thirds of our overall greenhouse gas emissions. The other third comes from land use and methane. So I will go back to our home screen, and you know, we are almost at time. So one last quick action.
Unknown Speaker 1:47:35
Renewable,
Unknown Speaker 1:47:37
I keep hearing, I’m gonna, you know,
Unknown Speaker 1:47:39
we’re gonna end the three.
Unknown Speaker 1:47:40
Okay. Okay, so I’m going to do renewables, plant the trees, and then we’re going to call it so we’re gonna, we’re gonna max out the subsidies on renewables.
Unknown Speaker 1:47:53
Yeah, we save the world,
Unknown Speaker 1:47:54
save the world? Well, we, we made an impact. What do you think planting trees is going to do? Is it gonna have a big impact? Sure. So let’s see if this does it. Just a little bit? Well, I’ll point out it under planting trees. Again, what we can do is look at the related graphs, and you can look at how much carbon gets removed per year. And what are what’s one of the challenges with planting trees? Is it isn’t an instant effect. No, yeah. Yeah. Trees, take some trees take a while to grow. And so that’s another dynamic I’d like to highlight is that there are lags in the system. Hmm. So, you know, we only got the tip of the iceberg here. Like we saw the crowding out effect, we saw a lags. And you know, there’s a lot you can explore with this system. And, again, don’t assume that it’s meant to predict the future rather use it as a tool to help challenge your mental model and strengthen that. So with that, I’m going to switch back to the presentation. Thank you all for playing along with this.
Unknown Speaker 1:49:13
I’m just going to go with a very brief, debriefing part of the mini workshop. And what I would like us to do is take one minute to silently reflect on your experience. And I want you to think about the possibility that we actually create this world and think about what you love about being part of the future. So I’m going to set a timer for just one minute
Unknown Speaker 1:50:38
Okay, thank you very much for that one moment of silence. Next. I have just one more slide. And that’s this discussion with the following three questions. What surprised you? What were some of your key insights? And how do you think these can be applied to the challenges facing long
Unknown Speaker 1:51:01
run? I think it surprised me how limited the effect was on pricing out coal. With big taxes. Yeah. It wasn’t like just putting a bunch of taxes on coal brought the temperature down substantially. Right. For me, an insight here is just that. I’m not sure I’m well calibrated to what makes the biggest difference into what what’s already on the status quo if we do nothing? And what what needs nudges, to to get there faster? Sure, that’s a really good point and on nudges, thinking about what are some helpful co policies like, you know, we have more electrification, we probably want more renewables, for example, and how do we encourage that? Any other thoughts?
Unknown Speaker 1:52:10
I never thought that the problem that we are facing would be an easy one to solve. But I feel like it’s even harder than that. I realized,
Unknown Speaker 1:52:20
it is hard. Yeah. This is
Unknown Speaker 1:52:24
the removal, the removal of the carbon made, the bigger difference is what I was seeing, and the removal and there’s the energy efficiency of things needing less. And I was gonna say, I think that’s part of the key to is replacing, replacing the sources and attacking it from an emissions only standpoint, versus building on efficiency and the electrification portion where you’re trying to conserve the energy meaning last, less demand, it’s the less demand overall that’s going to have it, it’s going to make a difference, maybe, but
Unknown Speaker 1:53:00
that’s just yawn maybe one way I can summarize is there’s no silver bullet. It’s not like one of them’s one action, it’s gonna solve everything. No. Not that.
Unknown Speaker 1:53:11
I agree. I agree with that. And, you know, definitely depositing less carbon in the atmosphere makes a big difference. The thing I was when I said I was pessimistic was just the very difficult fundamental challenges with Director capture. Something that’s only 400 parts per million, that, you know, taking a dilute substance and transporting it to some system that actually captures it, and then stores it without, that’s a very difficult problem.
Unknown Speaker 1:53:41
Yeah. And this simulator helps you see the scale of that problem. And for us, we maxed everything out, like someone pointed out, and in the real world, we might not be able to match every one of these out. Heather, I will ask them was one more slide and misspoke. If you could show that again.
Unknown Speaker 1:53:58
Hey, thank you, Adam. Heading out.
Unknown Speaker 1:54:00
Thanks for hanging on, Charles.
Unknown Speaker 1:54:03
Thanks. So it’s fantastic.
Unknown Speaker 1:54:06
And this is just the thank you slide. I want to say it’s not going to be easy. As we assessed, it’s gonna be worth it. And I hope you found this mini workshop worth it. I encourage you to learn more by checking out Climate Interactive dot orgy. And with that, I just want to thank you for your time and attention with this.
Unknown Speaker 1:54:26
Thank you. That was fantastic, Adam, that really, I really appreciate that you taking the time to lead us through that.
Unknown Speaker 1:54:34
Yeah. And as I pointed out, we could easily go on for a long time with this, like these workshops, lasts for well over an hour. And you know, they could easily go on for more than that.
Unknown Speaker 1:54:46
And so that website that you had there on that final slide would then tell us how we could participate in a bigger workshop.
Unknown Speaker 1:54:54
That’s right. Well, you can do is find a local ambassador, which is What I am? Yes, yes, that is what I’m working on. And we do hold these workshops from time to time. And there are loads of fun. They last a while, and they’re very interactive. Cool, especially when it’s in person I look forward to when we can have an in person one again.
Unknown Speaker 1:55:20
Oh, do I look forward to being in person again? Yes. No, thank you. That went really well done. Great. Great. Leading, great job leading us through
Unknown Speaker 1:55:35
that. Sure. And I want to thank everyone for participating. I know, it’s not usual that we are this interactive in the presentations.
Unknown Speaker 1:55:42
That’s fun. Okay, um, so, yes,
Unknown Speaker 1:55:49
I was gonna be like, how do I get on this? So I could let my kids play with it. And I did find the link. That’s what I’m doing over here. So that’s all?
Unknown Speaker 1:56:04
Do I Are you willing to share those slides with us?
Unknown Speaker 1:56:10
Sure, I can email them to Heather in the form of a PDF. And they have additional material, if you want to look at say how the model is tested against some of the other integrated assessment models and things like that. But honestly, your best bet, also is to go online and check out the website. There’s loads of information.
Unknown Speaker 1:56:33
I have a module series, a training series that’s been on my to do list, and I haven’t gotten around to it yet. But they have a good breakdown. I think, Adam, it’s like six or seven models, modules or something. Right. I think maybe they’re one to two hours each. But seemed like a good, manageable approach. Although I will say I have not managed to do that yet. So
Unknown Speaker 1:56:54
sure, I’ll say, sorry, Heather.
Unknown Speaker 1:56:57
Sorry, I was just gonna say I do have the PDF version of that. So I can send that out after the meeting today. And I can include the link for the website, too.
Unknown Speaker 1:57:07
That is the main reason I want to I didn’t write on that website went away.
Unknown Speaker 1:57:14
Yeah, I’ll just add to Lisa’s point, I did go through the training. It’s fantastic. It’s not just about the simulator. It’s about encouraging effective climate action simulator, just a means to that. Love it. And it’s just a lot of fun. It’s It’s, uh, you know, it’s good to have fun. And I think the simulator also encourages that.
Unknown Speaker 1:57:33
For sure. That was a lot of fun. Cool. Um, well, I think we have reached the end of our agenda. We no longer have a council member here to provide us any, any items from Council. There is information attached to your board packet, please read it. And with that, the last item is to adjourn. Is there a motion to adjourn?
Unknown Speaker 1:58:07
Almost, yeah. Move it all second.
Unknown Speaker 1:58:10
All right. All in favor. There we go. All right. Thank you, everybody. Thank you,
Unknown Speaker 1:58:17
everyone. See you next month. Bye.